Last weekend I was able to volunteer at the World Domination Summit in Portland, OR. How did I even hear about this oddly named conference? Well, it all goes back to a time when I was in the exotic land of Egypt.

I had landed a gig teaching English at a private school in Cairo. Teaching was never what I had intended to do, and it was really just a means to facilitate travel. In any case, I was trying to figure out how to get TrekDek up and running. The process of figuring out how to get this business off the ground involved reading a lot of books, one of which was of course, The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau.I e-mailed him to tell him how much I enjoyed his book and maybe get some feedback on TrekDek. To my surprise, he actually responded. Awesome.

Flash forward to May 2011. I moved to Portland because a) it is an awesome city and b) I thought it would be a great place to launch TrekDek. After my first batch of cards was made, I remembered that Chris lived in Portland. I sent him a few decks and once again to my surprise, he enjoyed them so much that he wanted to put them in all the WDS gift bags. Score! It was at this point that I looked up what it was. After reading about it, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be there personally to see all the awesome speakers and get some feedback from the WDS attendees. I begged and pleaded to be able to volunteer for a few weeks and I am happy to say my strategy of wearing the WDS staff down payed off.

The Best Part of WDS

Hands down, the best part of WDS was meeting the fantastic attendees. I’ve never met so many people looking to live life on their own terms. Most of my peers from college are struggling to define themselves through their careers, or attempted careers (sucky economy and all). It was refreshing to meet entrepreneurs, travelers, pastors, speakers, bloggers, and translators. I won’t even begin to tell you how many side projects that were being discussed.

The beer tour was a fantastic opportunity to meet some excellent WDS peeps (shout-out to Group 1). I had a long talk with Caleb Wojcki (@calebwojcik) about his upcoming wedding and plans for a long trip to Bali. Though I can’t say I’m not a little jealous of his upcoming adventure, it was inspiring to hear him talk about his aspirations and the concrete steps he is taking to get there. I wish you the best of luck (though luck has very little do with it) on your journey.

TrekDek reception

Though I don’t mean to toot my own horn, I received very positive feedback on the TrekDek Playing Cards. In order to work TrekDek into the conversation without sounding too much like a sales guy, I had to make my own TrekDek jewelry. Now I know what you’re wondering and no, there aren’t any pearl TrekDek necklaces for sale. What I ended up doing was punching a hole through a pack of TrekDek cards, running a book ring through it, and attaching it to the name tag chain everyone was wearing. This was a much less awkward way of talking about the cards because most of the time, the person I was talking to would ask “why the heck are you wearing those?” It occured to me later that it wasn’t obvious that I was the guy behind the cards and not just a huge fan.

There were a couple of suggestions that a few people had for the cards:

A. Make it obvious that they double as actual playing cards

B. Have a website where people can upload the stories of their adventures that took place while accomplishing a TrekDek challenge.

Both are good points. In fact, I’ve already been working on B for a quite a while. Its still under development but you can test out some of the features here . Don’t be too harsh, it is still far from complete but I would love your feedback.See you next year

I saw the amount of people that signed up for next year. All I can say is…Wow.

Good luck on your quest for world domination and I will see you in a year!